Kyle Busch stands up for couple who accelerated plans for Las Vegas wedding

Bobby Dezarov (cq) stands to the side as his new wife, Crystal, and NASCAR driver Kyle Busch take a photo at Chapel of the Bells on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2014. The Palm Desert, Calif. couple won a Las Vegas Motor Speedway Facebook contest to have Busch attend their wedding. (Samantha Clemens/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Kyle Busch stands up for couple who accelerated plans for Las Vegas wedding

The bride was blushing. She wore a blue print dress and a jean jacket.

The groom looked bemused. Like most grooms, his eyes appeared glazed. He wore a white shirt with a black pattern, jeans, and black skate shoes with the letters DC on the side in green.

The groomsman just looked fast. He had on a black polo shirt with the M&M’S logo over the breast pocket.

The groomsman was Kyle Busch, who has won 28 NASCAR Cup races and finished a career-high fourth in the points last season.

The bride, whose name was Crystal Riley — it’s Crystal Dezarov now — indicated that she loves Kyle Busch almost as much as she loves her new husband, Bobby Dezarov, who restores Mustangs in the high desert of California and is the four-time champion of the street stock division at Willow Springs Motorsports Park out there.

A couple of weeks ago, after Crystal and Bobby decided they would get married, Crystal wrote Las Vegas Motor Speedway. She indicated that she loved Kyle Busch almost as much as she loved her fiance and that they were planning to get married, in October.

Crystal, who is a veterinary assistant in Palm Desert, Calif., when she’s not watching Kyle Busch drive around in circles, was out wrangling a pony when the speedway called back.

They said the Goody’s Headache Relief Shot 500 was in October in Martinsville, Va., and three other races were scheduled in October, and all of these races were part of the Chase for the Sprint Cup. So chances were that Kyle was going to be a little busy then.

But the speedway people were bringing him to town on Jan. 21, to help spur ticket sales for the Kobalt 400 at LVMS on March 9. If the happy couple would consider moving the wedding up, perhaps they could say something to Kyle.

If truth be known, the speedway was going to arrange for somebody to be married, even if it was two Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans.

“We had to accelerate it a little bit,” Bobby Dezarov said as he and Crystal waited in the vestibule of the Chapel of the Bells at 2233 Las Vegas Boulevard South for the groomsman with the heavy right foot to arrive.

Accelerate certainly was a great choice of word because the speedway folks got Kyle Busch to the church on time, and then everybody went into the little chapel lickity-split, and then Pastor Joseph W. Bird was standing front and center in it, ready to roll.

Kyle Busch was standing up there, too, to the pastor’s left. I heard the pastor tell the groomsman with the heavy right foot that he had grown up in the Carolinas and that he had watched Bobby Isaac tear around the dirt tracks down there.

Then the Celine Dion music started to play because it can’t be an official wedding without Celine Dion music, regardless of how many NASCAR drivers are part of it.

There must have been 20 witnesses. About 17 had cameras. One was wearing a bowling-type shirt that said “Lucky’s Speed Shop” on back. This was Tyler Lockhart, Bobby Dezarvov’s crew chief.

So Pastor Bird said despite all of those cameras, the reason we were there was to observe the laws, covenants and obligations of holy matrimony. Pastor Bird was the chief steward now. And when Bobby Dezarov solemnly vowed that he and Crystal would be faithful partners in sickness and in health — and for all 600 miles at Charlotte, even if there was a rain delay — his eyes no longer were glazed.

They were downright moist because tears were in them. And if word of this gets around to the other street stock drivers back home, they’ll probably never let Bobby forget it, because you know how street stock drivers are.

So Bobby Dezarov kissed his new bride, and Kyle Busch said let him be the first to congratulate the happy couple.

People clapped and cheered. The whole thing took all of nine minutes, during which NASCAR did not once try to change the Chase for the Sprint Cup format. Which everybody thought was even more remarkable than the blushing bride’s smile.

“This is actually the second wedding I’ve been a part of (like this),” the younger Busch brother said. “The other one was at the speedway in victory lane. I had just won the Sprint Cup Series pole award, and there was a couple getting married there. I had to wait for them to be done, so we could take the photos.”

And though Kyle Busch has his detractors in the garage area and in the grandstands, all agreed that it was pretty awesome for him to do this, and that it also was pretty awesome how he slid the name of the series sponsor in there like that.

He signed the racing cap belonging to Jax, the blushing bride’s 3-year-old son, and then he signed the wedding document, which was the most important autograph of all, at least as far as Crystal and Bobby Dezarov were concerned.

After Kyle left to help the speedway people sell race tickets, the others stood outside the chapel and talked and watched guys bungee jump off the Stratosphere.

Across the parking lot was one of those gun ranges where you could shoot a machine gun. As cool a place as that might be to start a honeymoon, Crystal said she and Bobby were putting theirs off until March.

They’re coming back for the Kobalt 400. They already have tickets and garage passes.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski